What is Personalized Learning?

Personalized learning refers to the efforts made to tailor education for various students. The main objective of personalized learning is to meet their different needs.

Personalized learning refers to the adjustment of pace, adjustment of approach and finally connecting to the interests and experiences of the learner. Usually, technology is implemented to facilitate personalized learning environments.

Personalized learning is mainly intended to address the obvious learning needs, interests, cultural backgrounds and aspirations of an individual student. This form of education can also be known as student-centered learning.

What are the factors considered by the personalized learning system before implementation?

Personalized learning is mainly implemented to facilitate the academic success of each and every student individually. For that, certain things have to be taken into account such as:

The student’s learning needs,

Aspirations of the specific student,

The student’s interest.

After taking into account those things mentioned above, customizations and tweaks are done in learning to suit the individual needs of each student.

Why personalized learning?

Personalized learning has three key benefits:

It is “learner focused,” provides opportunities to the learner that reflect a comprehensibility of the needs, strengths, and interests of each.

Personalized learning allows the learner to progress at his/her own speed based on competency.

Personalized learning allows the learner to take ownership of his/her learning. It has the capability to adjust dynamically to the skills, curiosity and goals of the learner.

How to implement personalized learning

Schools and tutors can implement a number of tactics to implement personalized learning in classes. Some of these mightn’t be too easy, but if done properly, the results will certainly be positive from the students’ point of view.

Reconfiguring the educational structure such that students are organized into small groups along with a teacher who has to know the handful number of students in the group well. The teacher also has to know their academic weaknesses, their strengths, and interests. It’s basically a “school-within-school” form of approach. Themed-based activities become the key.

Eliminate the grouping of students on the basis of tiered courses based on past academic performance. Differentiated learning needs to be implemented.

Students may maintain personal learning plans based on their needs and interests. These might not relate to the school curriculum, but from a personalized learning viewpoint, this will benefit them tremendously.

Using alternative approaches to education such as:

- Blended learning,

- Authentic learning,

- Project-based learning,

- Community-based learning.

Student voice must play a big role in personalized learning. This is for the student where each and every student should have the right to express their opinion. Students should be given the freedom of choice as well as personal responsibility whenever personalized learning is brought under concern.

Each and every student is different in his/her own special way. Some might be good in science, some in literature or some in painting. The thing is to nurture the key skill, the key interest of the student. Personalized learning is definitely one of the key ways to make that happen because it is customizable. There’s no specific approach as a whole. There are many. Students can choose the one according to their liking which the most beautiful aspect of it. With that, we’ll sign off for now. Hope you had a good read.

Sudipto Das

Sudipto writes technical and educational content periodically for wizert.com and backs it up with extensive research and relevant examples. He's an avid reader and a tech enthusiast at the same time with a little bit of “Arsenal Football Club” thrown in as well. He's got a B.Tech in Electronics and Instrumentation.
Follow him on twitter @SudiptoDas1993